End of the World
by L. FitzMaurice
Summary: My personal interpretation of what on earth is going on at Ohtori. I think it explains alot. Uses an invented character for this purpose.


End of the World  
  
"nine-hundred-ninety-eight... nine-hundred-ninety-nine... one thousand."  
  
Lucio collapsed on the hard dojo floor, breath tearing from him in great booming coughs. One thousand strokes with a weighted practice sword always brought him to this. Sweat poured from his shivering body. The rapid pumping of his heart caused blue veins to stand up across his arms.  
Groping fingers located a notebook and pen placed in advance. Forcing a small measure of life into his arms, he scribbled down the fleeting thoughts that now traveled through his mind. Here things were _clearer_. His normal state was by no means somnambulant, but there were some thoughts that his mind simply refused to hold, turning and skittering away from them. At normal times. But here, on the edge of death by exhaustion, he could think them, he could feel them. So he wrote down what he thought now, in order to know it later.  
Now he saw, and at long last the different portions fell into something resembling a full picture. Now he could explain what it was that was wrong about this place.  
This place. Ohtori Academy. An excellent boarding school, with good teachers and facilities, and a splendid site overlooking the town by the sea. A school for gifted and well-off students, a place where the elite could send their children with no worries. So everyone knew. So everyone thought. Yet there was _something_ – and now he knew what it was. A single quotation was scrawled across the pages.  
  
He was now wandering on the outskirts of the academy. (Outskirts. Now there was a word. How large was this place anyway?) It was heading towards evening, and everything seemed to be bathed in a golden light. There were a number of outlying dormitories here, with simple tracks leading to them. Off in the distance he saw the outlines of the dormitory where the Kaoru's lived. Did any others live there, he wondered?  
He finally reached his destination. The track divided into five. He knew where four of the tracks went, but he now turned towards the fifth. For some reason he had never traversed it. It all seemed silly now. Probably just a delusion brought on by exhaustion and his over-active imagination. How could it be...? He stamped down on that train of thoughts.  
  
The track stretched out over the low hills, and entered a thin spinney in the distance. He wanted to go along, yet fought against an almost overpowering reluctance. Everything seemed foolish and pointless. Why should he make such an effort?  
Yet there was one thing that held him, one thing that had pursued him since his earliest days: a genuine love of knowledge, a fierce resentment of boundaries set on anything. So, slowly, as though lead weights constrained his feet, he forced himself down the long-disused track.  
The track itself was very pleasant to walk on, with fine views all around. The spinney itself consisted largely of maple trees, and their whirring buds fell about him in cascades. Everything was bathed in the soft evening light. Here the road was paved with cobblestones, well worn, and yet covered with leaves as though long disused.  
His breath caught. Ahead of him there was a small circular clearing, with a well in the centre. Long before he reached it, he knew that there would be two stone benches on either side, and the whole would be fenced with cast iron railings.  
Ahead the path stretched on. Lucio continued, feeling the sense of unreality clamp down on him like a vice. The track opened up into a courtyard, and an old manor house stood in front of him. Purple jacarandas blossomed on either side of them, yet the blossoms were fading, as though caught in perpetual autumn. Lucio advanced slowly. There was no sound here, except for the rustle of his feet through the fallen leaves. The front door creaked as he pushed it open. Inside, he saw a long hallway, with Persian carpets on the floor, the walls mounted with horned skulls and old weapons. A staircase climbed up to some distant regions. Lucio dropped to his knees, convulsing with silent laughter. He knew this place.  
He sat on the steps with his head buried in his arms for hours. He knew this place. It wasn't supposed to be here. He had grown up in it, on another continent, many, many years ago. Why was it here? And he knew. His body shook from time to time. He did not move. He did not go away. Where was there to go?  
  
A voice called him out of his meditations. Night had fallen by this time, and the stars glittered like jewels above. It was Touga Kiryuu, Student council president  
"What is bothering you?" he said with a secretive smile playing across his elegant features.  
Slowly, Lucio raised his head. It seemed pointless to explain. So, instead, he asked:  
"What's your mother's name?"  
"I'm sorry?"  
"I asked – what was your mother's name?"  
"Why do you ask?"  
"You don't know, do you?"  
Touga did not respond, nor change his expression  
"You don't." It was a statement. "I don't either. Neither does either of us know our father's names. I've asked others. Let me ask you another few questions: Where do you come from? The place, its name, mundane things like that. Can you remember any of it? Not just a few tableaux, but all of it?" Lucio slowly pushed himself to his feet.  
Touga did not respond in any manner.  
"I don't know that either. Nor do others. Don't you find it odd? I don't – and that I find odd."  
"What are you trying to say?"  
"I am trying to say that all but a few of my memories are of Ohtori. The others are one or two brightly lit tableaux – and only important things, of memories that mean a great deal to me. I don't remember anything mundane or ordinary from those days. No simple walks, friends who are not here, or birthdays or anything."  
"And...?"  
"And ask yourself this: Have you ever been into the town? I have. At least, I must have. I come back from it with food and cooking materials. Yet, I can't remember the cashiers face. Nor do I remember any other people there. Even the stores and markets are like a dream. I've even spent a year somewhere else. Do you think I can remember anything clearly? No... again only those tableaux. And I returned – surprise, surprise – just in time to take part in a duel. I've asked others who have been away. They give me the same answer, _but they don't find it odd in the slightest_."  
Touga's face did not change. Lucio's temper, already frayed by exhaustion, snapped.  
"Dammit! Think for a second. This isn't real. Nothing is real, but this damned place. And nothing here is more real than those infernal duels. Not even we are! And if that isn't enough, take a look around you. All those few memories I have of my parents and my childhood, they _all come from this place_! I have never been anywhere else. Nor have you, or anyone. What is going on here? _Nothing else exists!"_  
He gestured violently with his practice-sword.  
"Think of it. A master musician and mathematician – at the age of thirteen? Who speaks like that? Shouldn't he be world-famous and attract more attention? Where are his parents? Where are any of our parents? Can you remember, clearly, so much as one relative? _And stop looking like that!"_  
Lucio raised his practice sword as if to strike – and then let it slip through his fingers impotently. It clattered on the steps.  
"No..." he said softly. "No..."  
He turned around  
"I thought... if I explained, you'd see it to. Then I'd have someone else who understood. I thought you might understand, of all the people here, Student Council President..." His shoulders slumped, and he began to stumble towards the house's door.  
"Wait." Touga's voice rolled after him.  
Lucio half-turned and stared.  
"Can you hear it?"  
"What on earth are you on..." he stopped. He could hear something. Something like a great engine, starting. An engine, an engine...  
"If your soul has not truly given up, then you will hear it. The sound that races through the End of the World."  
Bright, harsh light was suddenly there, white and blinding like the noonday sun. A wind whipped up, blowing hair back, like the wind of a great passage.  
Touga's uniform blew open around him as he stood up.  
"Come! Come with us and find the world you seek!"  
Suddenly, impossibly, a car was there, there, in the courtyard without roads, a red car with white seats, driven by a silver-haired devil from the wildest imaginations of Doré.  
  
The road flowed underneath the wheels, a river of black glass. There were no other cars. No houses or habitations lined the road. The only lights were from the identical lampposts and the cold stars above. It was hard to tell how fast they were going.  
The engine shuddered beneath them.  
"Who are you?"  
Touga answered. "Akio Ohtori, the acting-headmaster of Ohtori Academy."  
There was a jolt and the car accelerated.  
"What do you want from me?"  
Again, Touga answered in Akio's stead. "What do you want yourself?"  
The question struck him with singular force.  
"I want... I want..." Lucio thought. "I want _to know_. The truth. Everything. What's going on here."  
The deep voice of the chairman resounded for the first time.  
"Then I will show you End of the World, to you too now!"  
  
And then there was no more road. The car shot off into a starry expanse, a cold void. There was no more road, and no more world. No more anything, but this vast, borderless expanse studded with distant stars. The cold air struck the breath from them.  
They fell, tumbling, whirling, falling ever further and further. Did the car support them? Was it moving with some purpose? Or was it something else? On the edge of his consciousness Lucio could hear, very faintly, the sound of great wings.  
Akio's mocking laughter enveloped them. Lucio began to see flashes in his mind, thoughts and memories.  
A single world spins through the void, a world orbiting a life-giving sun, a world called Earth that should have been instantly familiar to Lucio, yet he felt as though he was seeing it for the first time.  
A single Prince rules and sees all, a single star is set as fulcrum of all things, and it is good. A Witch loves the Prince, and they find happiness, and it is good. Yet, by his nature, the Prince is sometimes angry, sometimes sick. The Witch tries to heal him. Then, something changes. The one becomes two. There are now two Princes, two brothers, one of the Light and one of the Dark, one a figure wreathed in brilliant light, and another the Shadow That Comes From The Light. A Dark Star, a Dark Prince _who's mocking features so closely resembled those of the chairman's_. The brothers fight. A war rages, a war that lasts ten thousand years, a war which is fought for the lost, original power, the power to create, to control and to shape all things.  
Finally, the Dark Prince musters a great army from among his followers and drives straight towards his Brother's castle. The world collapses in the titanic struggle. The final battle is fought between the Princes, a battle in which the world is destroyed – and the rebellious one strikes his brother down. Before he can deliver the final blow, the Witch rescues the Prince, seals him and his castle deep within her.  
The Dark Prince is angry, but unable to do anything. His sword and the million swords of his followers strike the Witch down, but she does not die, trapped and cored as she is with the powers of her Prince.  
The armies fade. The world dissolves away into nothingness. There is naught left but the barren limbo. The Dark Star is left without recourse, without option. He does not have his lost power, the power of the Premium Mobile, the power to create from nothing. Yet that power is still preserved in the Witch – and potentially in those queer beings they created when they were One, the humans. The Dark Prince conceives a plan – he cannot gain his brother's power, since it is locked away from his sin, but another might unlock it. He stretches out his hand over the void and something comes into being – a place where people grow and develop, where they learn and perhaps gain the nobility to change everything. An academy.  
  
Lucio awoke. Had it been a dream? No – of that much he was certain. All things were clear now. Revolution... revolution... What did the word mean? A cyclical movement, beginning and returning to the same place. The serpent Ouroboros, eating its own tail... Revolution – return – restart... An engine that needed to be restarted periodically... That was the key to the mysteries of this place, the only place left...  
And now he knew the full meaning of the quotation scrawled in his notebook through the mists of exhaustion.  
"And I beheld a new heaven, and a new earth, for the old heaven and earth had passed away."


End file.
